Venona and Alger Hiss JOHN LOWENTHAL Alger Hiss, the American diplomat tried in a US federal district court in New York and convicted in 1950 of perjury, remains a disputed icon of the Cold War, representing either infiltration of the Roosevelt and Truman administrations by Communist spies or an historic miscarriage of justice. This article shows that a ‘Venona’ document released by the US and the UK in 1996 tentatively identifying Hiss as an espionage agent is erroneous and irreconcilable with the evidence presented by the US at Hiss’s trials; that KGB documents have been misconstrued as supporting the identification; and that another Venona document tends to exonerate rather than to implicate Hiss. Venona errors regarding Hiss raise questions about the accuracy and reliability of the entire Venona process and its products. The other curious thing about the Hiss case is the psychology of believing that Hiss was a spy, which requires abandoning much of what we know about rational thought. – Molly Ivins, columnist (1996)1 The Hiss case blazed into public life in 1948 and promptly became an icon of the Cold War in America. It catapulted Richard Nixon all the way to the presidency, two decades later. It sundered the nation along fault lines of ideology, politics, and class.2 The power and reach of its political consequences have outlived the Cold War: half a century after it erupted before a congressional committee, the case contributed to sinking one of President Clinton’s major appointments when a key senator declared, ‘I would find it very difficult to support a nominee for Director of the CIA who did not believe that Alger Hiss was a spy.’3 The case is still hotly disputed in America and England, where the release in 1996 of ‘Venona’ messages – Soviet cablegrams covertly monitored by the US Army during World War II – have added fuel to the fire. A widely-circulated but erroneous view is that Venona confirms Hiss’s guilt because a 1945 Soviet cablegram describes an espionage agent covernamed ‘Ales’ whom the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) tentatively identified as Alger Hiss. Intelligence and National Security, Vol.15, No.3 (Autumn 2000), pp.98–130 PUBLISHED BY FRANK CASS, LONDON VENONA AND ALGER HISS 99 For all the spate of recent publications on Hiss and Venona, few readers have been able to go behind conclusory statements in the secondary literature to assess the Venona documents directly. This article will do that, after an introduction to the Hiss case and the Venona project. By comparing the cablegram description of Ales with undisputed facts about Hiss and the US government’s case against him, this article will demonstrate that the FBI was mistaken and that Ales cannot have been Hiss. Likewise, KGB documents recently claimed to confirm the Venona identification of Ales as Hiss are shown not to do so. That Ales was not Hiss does not necessarily answer the question of whether Hiss was a spy. Many books have addressed that question, still more are in process, and a short article cannot do it full justice. Nevertheless, it is significant that Venona does not support the case against Hiss. On the contrary, a 1943 Venona cablegram appears to be exculpatory rather than incriminating, because it refers openly to Hiss when Soviet practice was to mention spies only by their covernames. Hiss is not the only person whom Venona has been said to incriminate. But the Venona team’s manifest errors regarding Hiss, and US intelligence agencies’ selective use of Venona material for public relations, contribute to doubts about the accuracy and reliability of at least some Venona products that putatively implicate other people. THE HISS CASE In August 1948, Time magazine editor and ex-Communist Whittaker Chambers testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee that Alger Hiss, president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and former State Department official, had been a fellow-Communist in the 1930s but that they had not engaged in espionage.4 Hiss denied that he had ever been a Communist or known anyone by the name of Whittaker Chambers. He recognized Chambers, however, as the freelance journalist George Crosley (one of Chambers’s aliases), whom Hiss had helped out in Washington in the mid-1930s Depression years and eventually dismissed as a deadbeat.5 Chambers’s accusation did not fit the Alger Hiss known to his many friends and colleagues as personally straight-arrow and politically conventional. When Hiss was convicted, in effect, of having been an espionage agent for the Soviet Union, a Washington journalist reported that everyone he talked with who had worked with Hiss in the government believed him innocent: ‘The general impression is that Hiss was never much of a radical.… I know no one who ever thought him a militant liberal, much less a Red.’6 100 INTELLIGENCE AND NATIONAL SECURITY Hiss was certainly an unreconstructed New-Deal liberal, but he had never hesitated to recommend policies at odds with the Soviet Union. In the State Department after the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact (August 1939), Hiss argued that giving aid to the Allies would not violate international law, and he urged revision of the Neutrality Act to remove its barriers to such aid.7 At the Yalta conference, which he attended as a member of the US delegation, Hiss opposed the Soviet demand for three votes in the United Nations-to-be (but was overruled by President Roosevelt).8 As a private citizen after he left the State Department, Hiss was a prime mover of the Marshall Plan of aid to war-ravaged Europe, the centrepiece of the Truman Doctrine and its strategy of ‘containment’ of the Soviet Union.9 Soviet leaders denounced the Marshall Plan as creating a hostile encirclement of the Soviet Union, and the political Left in the United States denounced it as a war-breeding, anti-Soviet ‘Martial Plan’. But Hiss organized a committee of bankers, lawyers, and business executives to support enabling legislation for the plan, and he wrote an article for The New York Times Magazine warning of the consequences if the plan were not adopted: Strategically, our abandonment of Europe would expose 270 million people and the world’s second greatest industrial complex to absorption in the vast area already dominated by Communist ideology and by Soviet interests.10 Four months later (March 1948), Congress adopted the Marshall Plan.11 Five months after that, Chambers publicly charged that ‘Alger Hiss was a Communist and may be now.’12 Hiss sued Chambers for libel, whereupon Chambers repudiated his many denials of espionage and produced excerpts and copies of State Department documents, dated in 1938, which he said Hiss’s wife, Priscilla, had copied on the family typewriter from original documents brought home overnight by Hiss. Chambers said he picked up the retyped copies at the Hisses’ home every week or ten days and took them to Baltimore to be photographed for delivery to a Soviet agent.13 ‘If Chambers actually used such a procedure to relay documents from their source to the collector,’ observed a writer on espionage practices, ‘he not only employed the most primitive and precarious method, but he also violated a very important rule in the Soviet spy book’ requiring transfers of documents to take place outdoors or in a public venue and not more often than once a month from the same source.14 No doubt there were Soviet agents who did not always follow the rules, but if Chambers was one of them, the carelessness he also attributed to Hiss did not square with the latter’s reputation as a man of prudence and discipline, punctilious about VENONA AND ALGER HISS 101 rules of procedure. A former British secret service officer remarked: Chambers’s story is wildly improbable – a defiance of strict basic safety rules imposed by the Soviet Secret Service on its agents…. If Hiss were guilty … it is impossible to understand why a man of such high intelligence, and in a position where a hint of treachery could –and, in fact, did–hit the headlines overnight, omitted the most elementary precautions to protect himself. Why, if he knew that Chambers was a Soviet agent, did he let him call so regularly at his home, possibly watched by nosy neighbours from behind their window- curtains? Why did he let Priscilla copy borrowed secret documents on her own identifiable typewriter? Why, after Chambers said he had photographed the typescripts, did Hiss not demand them back so that he could be sure of their destruction by burning them himself? Why, after Chambers defected and the possibility of betrayal arose, was the identifiable Hiss machine casually given away to a traceable witness instead of being irrecoverably dumped in the Potomac river? Hiss was not, after all, a novice in elementary security precautions.15 Nor was the content of the papers sensational or sensitive: most of the retyped pages were copied from a report on economic conditions in Manchuria, and all them were soon displayed with the original documents in open court.16 Chambers’s story reads more like a crude frame-up than real espionage, but, in those credulous days of the Cold War, it carried the day. Chambers also led House committee investigators to a pumpkin patch on his Maryland farm, where they pulled three rolls and two strips of 35- millimeter film from a hollowed-out pumpkin in which he had put them a few hours earlier. The film contained photographs of miscellaneous government documents, which Chambers also said Hiss had given him for espionage.17 Representative Nixon testified secretly that the ‘Pumpkin Papers’ were worthless, were not classified even as confidential, and had been widely distributed; but he nonetheless found them useful in persuading a grand jury to indict Hiss instead of Chambers.18 For the press and newsreel cameras, Nixon announced: ‘I am holding in my hand a microfilm of the most confidential, highly secret State Department documents’ conclusively establishing ‘one of the most serious, if not the most serious series of treasonable activities which has been launched against the Government in the history of America.’19 The next day, with Nixon’s charge on the front pages of major newspapers, the grand jury indicted Hiss.